BMC announcing their results tomorrow – looks like they are expected to be strong although it’s been Bladelogic & Remedy driving growth. I heard so many people say that BMC “overpaid” for Bladelogic……I’m not so sure. Talk about a halo effect! Deals with Cisco and Dell driven by the Blade products.

Quest announced their results today – license revenue very weak due to economy. Ugh – they had a tough one.

Noticed in Solarwinds IPO filing that their license revenue in Q1 2009 was essentially flat from Q1 2008. Flat = Excellent for most people in this environment. Hope they pull off the IPO – about time this space had one!

On another note…we’ve got some interesting announcements to make….not sure if we’ll get it out tomorrow – may have to wait until Wednesday.

Really interesting to me where these open source business models end up. Also, I wonder what Oracle is going to do with MySQL when it gets its hands on it? Of course nobody will know for sure for quite a while

It still amazes me the length of the summer holiday for kids in America. My guys are off for 11 weeks….when I was at school in England it was only 6 weeks summer holiday.

We’re busy planning for all those camps to fill that time. Flag Football camp for one, Horse Riding camp for another, school camp for a few weeks, sports camp at the gym for other weeks….it’s a big job all this planning and then, some of the camps are 11 until 3….hmm, how to get them to camp, pick them up from camp and still work?

Taking 2 of the kids over to the England to spend a week with their cousins and grand-parents in the middle of all that as well, and probably some family vacation, possibly in LA.

Just arrived on an overnight flight to London. In the cabin where I was seating the light switch was broken – so I spent all night with bright fluorescent lights shining at me. Really made for a good journey.

Really not a surprise at all. I’ve been saying for a long time that being successful in this space is difficult and my belief is that any “monitoring” company that tries to use the “give the open source away and charge for the professional edition” as its business model will fail. We’ve seen many of these already and they will continue to fail.

Look at who the most successful and rapidly growing companies are today…..Nimsoft, Service-Now, NetQoS, Solwarwinds…..none of these companies are using the open source business model.

Don’t get me wrong…I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with using Nagios or other platforms for monitoring. They fill a need and for certain environments they fill the need very well. BUT, what I am saying is that vendors that try to build a business out of offering a “professional edition” will fail. Monitoring/systems management is NOT sexy – it is hard work. It requires support for a huge range of platforms, constant testing, constant updating, scalability, reliability….all those things that we take very seriously.

Board meeting, customer meeting, investment bank meeting, partnership meeting, internal blitz going on, trying to get hold of our lawyers, re-booking flights for next week so that I can go to Oslo as well as London, canceling handyman for broken dishwaher …..and my assistant is on PTO!

This morning, software maker SolarWinds Inc. said it plans to offer 12.1 million shares at an estimated price range of $9.50 to $11.50 a share. That could net upwards of $100 million.

And the IPO could make its investors � Austin Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Insight Ventures � some money too. According to filings, all plan to sell some shares in the IPO. (Although AV is a minor player in SolarWinds, owning just 3.4 percent of shares before the offering.)

SolarWinds, which is profitable and had revenue of $93.1 million in 2008, would be Austin�s first IPO since 2006, when Golfsmith Holdings International stumbled out the gate. Nationally, there has been a drought of IPOs as well, with only two new issues on major U.S. stock exchanges in the first quarter, according to Hoover�s Inc.

It�s unclear when SolarWinds will go out, but it could be as early as today. (And then again, there�s always the possibility it won�t happen at all. It will depend on investor reaction.)

SolarWinds was founded in Tulsa, Okla., 11 years ago, and moved to Austin in late 2006 when local high-tech veteran Mike Bennett took over as CEO. Austin Ventures invested $7.5 million in the company in early 2007, joining Bain and Insight as backers.

If and when an IPO happens, SolarWinds will trade under the symbol SWI on the New York Stock Exchange.